Net Neutrality Legislation Passes in the US!

"The Federal Communications Commission is poised on Tuesday to pass net neutrality regulations, rules that would for the first time prevent Internet service providers from blocking or giving preferential treatment to Web sites on their networks."

A win for open access on hard-wires broadband. However, 3G networks will be open to data-throttling.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/12/fcc_copps_to_vote_in_favor_of.html?hpid=topnews

very interesting but late fact

Electronic Pick Pocketing

Inside Job

Saw this movie a few days ago (imdb) and thought -
Is the global financial crisis an example of ethical egoism being unstable? Will it stabilize, or are the egos/interests of those involved too deeply associated with the legislation controlling the financial sector (specifically in the US).

Has the Internet changed science?

I saw this interesting essay the other day about the impact of the internet and "big data" on science, and thought I'd share it here. Data mining in science is an impact of computing we didn't really get to talk about when we covered data mining, and may well wind up being a pretty important impact.

Link is here: http://www.wisdomofwhores.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Prospect_Big_data.pdf

"Delete Facebook Account" search on Google

The search "delete facebook account" is more popular on Google. Found the stats on this to be pretty interesting:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=delete%20facebook%20account&cmpt=q

Any connection with the stats and facebook users being aware of privacy issues?

The first truly honest privacy policy

Saw this on Slashdot today: http://www.itworld.com/print/129778

Live updates of DDoS attacks against Visa/Mastercard

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates

The technological and commercial skirmishes over WikiLeaks escalated into a full-blown online assault yesterday when, in a serious breach of internet security, a concerted online attack by activist supporters of WikiLeaks succeeded in disrupting MasterCard and Visa.

The acts were explicitly in "revenge" for the credit card companies' recent decisions to freeze all payments to the site, blaming illegal activity. Though it initially would acknowledge no more than "heavy traffic on its external corporate website", MasterCard was forced to admit last night that it had experienced "a service disruption to the MasterCard directory server", which banking sources said meant disruption throughout its global business.

Later, Visa's website was also inaccessible. A spokeswoman for Visa said the site was "experiencing heavier than normal traffic" and repeated attempts to load the Visa.com site was met without success.